Derek Wyatt's Blog

I’ve put my Vim configuration on GitHub now. Have a gander at http://github.com/derekwyatt/vim-config

The Vim ‘indent’ script for Scala that I’ve been working on is now starting to take some decent shape. If you’re a Scala coder and are working in Vim, I can now actually recommend this script :). It’s actually the least complicated one I’ve written that achieves this level of functionality; I’ve had a few kicks at this particular can and one of them in particular was way complicated and also slow.

Go grab it from Github.

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I found some time to update the indent file for Scala recently. It’s getting better and more complicated, unfortunately. Please feel free to fork it and make changes/fixes… I hate writing this thing :)

Grab it from my vim-scala repository on github.

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So, a little over a month ago, I changed departments where I work – I used to work in the Enterprise Software group and have moved to the System Architecture / Research group. There are some great things that go with this:

1. I get to work with Vim more than I used to because I now code a lot more than I used to.
2. I’ve effectively deleted Windows entirely and replaced it with Ubuntu (YAY!)
3. I’m getting a chance to deeply investigate Scala and Akka, which is a real treat! My research may not go anywhere, but the research itself is incredibly useful, I think – Scala and Akka are absolutely fantastic projects.

Once I figure out the right path to take in order to get some changes into the Scala repository for Vim, I’ll do that, but for the moment I’m just having a great time banging away at the docs and shoving things in my own repository.

What I’ve got at the moment is a 4000+ line reference file (in Vim help format, of course) that I’ve put together to help me better understand Scala, and give me a spot to put some critical information and tips / tricks I find as I go. I’ve also fixed up the indent file a bit and plan to enhance the syntax file when I get a chance too.

Because of Scala’s flexibility and terseness I find it a bit difficult to create code snippets for it, but I may do that in the future as well.

If you’re interested, head over to my vim-scala repository on GitHub and clone it down to your vim configuration.

Well, I got another patch from someone for protodef. It was just getting silly that I didn’t have anywhere to actually put this stuff and I was getting tired of people sending patches :). Now y’all can just fix stuff for me directly… go to it.

Head here for protodef.
Head here for fswitch.

I’ve finally updated FSwitch and ProtoDef after a long time waiting. Three guys gave me patches over many months and I’ve finally put them together into an actual couple of releases.

Thanks to Matt Spear, Timon Kelter and Dmitry Bashkatov. Sorry about the wait fellas.

So there’s been some scuttlebutt on the Twitters recently regarding this “Pathogen” script for Vim and I decided to have a look. In a word? “Sweet”. In a few words? Tim Pope is the absolute man.

This is an extremely simple and elegant script. All it does is manipulate the ‘runtimepath’ but it has a nice focus on allowing you to componentize your Vim extensions into their own, private ‘runtimepath’ tree segments. So what? So what?!? Now you can easily upgrade your extensions by just deleting the old tree, downloading the package and exploding it in place.

This would have saved my ass when xptemplate went through a revision that deleted files, and I didn’t notice. Having unwanted, autoloaded files in place was not a good thing.

And you can also just toss git suppositories straight into this as well – perfect updating.

Check out Tammer Saleh‘s post called The Modern Vim Config with Pathogen for a concise description on how to get it into your vimrc.

Rick over at Lococast.Net has some great screencasts up for Vim. I’ve watched a couple of them now, and I’m a happy dood… nice stuff! Go check ‘em out. Go… go now… stop… no, don’t do that, you know what I mean… that thing you were going to do, that dirty, naughty, disgusting thing?? Yeah, that. Don’t. Go watch his screencasts instead. Go here instead.

There’s a new video online in the Advanced Section called Globals, Commands and Functions. Go check it out.

Alright… I’ve had a lot of traffic lately and a lot of people emailing me (something’s occurred on the inter-web recently that’s picked up the interest in these videos beyond the usual 1k views per week… I don’t know what it was). This has sparked my interest in making more videos so that’s what I’m going to try and do.

But, in the last few months, I’ve also had a number of people asking me where they can send me a virtual beer, and I’ve had no place to do that. I never really cared, but hey… if a few bucks can offset my website costs every year then what the hell?

So, if you feel like making a donation of a few bucks, feel free to do so, and if you don’t, feel free to not do so :) Whatever you do, keep using Vim, and if you feel like making a donation to the Vim project instead, please do.